Things are really heating up out in the field event as you’ve joined us for the Professionalism Pole Vault. This is an event that requires a great level of ambition to raise the performance bar and reach new heights of customer service. Our participants must also have a real desire to adopt the best techniques to achieve the status of number one.
It certainly is a crowded field today, with several competitors striving to come out in the first position. Let’s see how they fare.
The Challenge
55% of customers expect a response within 3 hours of contacting a business. It’s the competitor who can meet their high expectations in the smoothest way that will get the win.
Winning Tactics
This customer has high standards and only expects to work with the best. No time for sloppiness, delays in service, and multiple attempts. It’s a race to the best first impression. This is where a number of tactics come into play:
1) Flexibility: By the looks of it, one of the more old school participants has hit the wall already. They are obviously too rigid and not prepared to function smoothly once they are faced with the barrier of being outside of their usual office environment. Contrast that with our more dynamic and modern contender who is soaring ahead. Just look at how they approach mobile working with such gusto without a hint of disruption to business as usual.
2) Team Management: Oh dear, it appears not every team is fielding the right person for the job. This is very frustrating for the waiting customer who must sit through multiple attempts before they can finally get the right person on the case.
However the team out in front has chosen their best contender. They have a system in place that ensures the customer can specify the type of service they require or the actual person. When that person isn’t available, their system automatically forwards the call to the next best option. Other participants simply can’t bridge this technology gap and it’s more of a lottery who picks up the call.
3) Speed: Customer response times are becoming ever more important as work lives get busier and it’s easy to find another competitor to work with instead. When it comes to professionalism, answering customer calls should be as rapid as possible. Winners adopt their approach so that waiting times are at a minimum. For starters, they ensure the customer call can be answered by multiple people in the team simultaneously. That means whoever is available can get there first. Even when a customer call slips through, notifications go straight to email and voicemails can be accessed wherever they happen to be on the day.
The Outcome
It seems most of the field are going to fall well short of meeting the demands of the modern customer. But our winner has delivered on every level. Because they are using a cloud-based method that adapts to their approaches, they can always have someone answer customer calls efficiently, in any location and deliver gold standard customer service.
Are you ready to compete in the 2016 Cloud Office Games? RingCentral is helping you get one up on the competition with a free 30-day trial of our cloud phone solution. Anyone that signs up for a free trial in the UK in the month of August will receive a very limited edition Cloud Office Games mug!
Note: Cloud Office Game mugs are only applicable to RingCentral UK accounts.
Originally published Aug 10, 2016, updated Apr 18, 2021
